Do we need to rethink work?

Work is not working

From the worker’s perspective, work increasingly feels broken. This is not the result of a single failure, but of intersecting forces: a more chaotic world, weak talent practices and organisational architectures that were never designed with humans in mind.

Precarity now spans both permanent and contract-based work. Technology, particularly AI, is viewed with suspicion, not because it is inherently harmful, but because it is increasingly used as a mechanism of control. When your manager is an algorithm, there is little room for discretion, negotiation, or humanity, a reality long familiar to gig workers.

The Covid pandemic reset expectations. Those who entered the workforce during that period often assumed remote work was simply part of the deal. Employers, wary of losing talent, initially hesitated to reassert contractual authority. That caution is now fading, and the resulting tension is eroding trust on both sides.

The industrial era was never architected around human flourishing. Its machine-and-process logic requires people to suppress their humanity and conform to narrow definitions of ‘professionalism’, effectively becoming well-behaved cogs in a system optimised for efficiency, not adaptability.

Despite the substantial sums organisations spend on their people, talent management remains non-strategic in many sectors. The absence of HR representation at the top table reflects this. Even where HR is present, the focus is often on process efficiency rather than human potential. Workers are treated as resources to be acquired, managed, and released, an input–process–output model that mirrors factory thinking.

In volatile markets, recruitment itself becomes performative. Large employers must appear to be hiring, even when intent is limited. AI tools reduce friction for employers while increasing it for candidates. Predictably, candidates respond in kind, using AI to maximise volume over quality. Trust deteriorates, and work becomes framed as a transactional system built on mutual suspicion.

Employer brand damage often begins internally. As targets slip, pressure intensifies. ‘Faster, longer, harder’, revealing a mindset closer to a galley ship than a knowledge enterprise.

At the same time, economic conditions are extending working lives, making today’s workplace more multi-generational than ever. Without shared understanding, generations judge one another using incompatible norms. Misinterpretations accumulate, and everyday interactions become charged, breeding a culture of defensiveness and perceived micro-aggression.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some organisations operate more like elite sports teams:

• United by purpose

• Rich in skill

• Capable of adapting together in real time.

But they remain the minority.

It is therefore unsurprising that many people are falling out of love with work.

Work is getting worse

As bad as this is, it appears to be getting worse.

A long-standing assumption, that a tertiary qualification would guarantee choice and opportunity, has now been laid bare. In some cases, a degree now results in significant debt while still leaving graduates short of the skills required to be employable. Some organisations are prepared to bridge this gap. However, some organisations are reassessing credential requirements and prioritising trainability, adaptiveness and motivation over formal qualifications.

Increasing disruption means that organisations cannot manage their talent and talent pipelines with any degree of confidence. The skills needed today are unlikely to be the skills needed tomorrow. Often it is easier to swap skilled contractors in and out as needed. But such people are relatively rare and so can command a premium rate.

Advances in technology, particularly in machine learning, is increasingly encroaching on work previously conducted by people. From a humanity perspective this is often for the good, particularly where the tech takes over dreary, dangerous or dirty work. But many people have traded their humanity to feed their children and pay the bills. Without deliberate reskilling or redesign of roles, such automation can render people economically irrelevant.

And even white-collar professionals are not immune to such encroachment. Technology is increasingly dismantling many traditional professional career paths, pushing us toward what could be described as a ‘post-careers’ world.

The collapse of career paths

Professional people typically followed a path that involved an educational front load, followed by an apprenticeship of sorts. This was followed by a period of economic usefulness followed by taking on senior roles that were often further removed from direct value creation, whilst still benefiting from the productivity of those earlier in their careers.

The thought of having worked long and hard to get to the career paydirt only to be told that your industry is about to become 90% automated will be a difficult pill to swallow. Economic irrelevance becomes particularly destabilising for individuals whose identity, status and lifestyle were built around roles that are now being automated.

This is not just an issue for individuals. Governments need to work out how to reengineer society so that large cohorts of capable but underutilised people remain socially and economically engaged.

A viable way forward

At the Intelligent Organisation, we consider how the nature of work might evolve in a manner where all stakeholders benefit.

A casual look at modern society suggests that there is a wide economic spectrum of people, extending from the homeless to the elite. This perhaps reflects a combination of luck, good parenting, education and drive. What is does not reflect is cognitive capacity. Whilst a successful businesswoman is rightly considered smart, so too should a homeless person who can survive on the streets on a day-to-day basis.

In many respects, we are all equals cognitively. It is just that some of us have directed our cognition along a self-developmental path. Please note, this is not so much the start of a socialist manifesto but to introduce cognition as a lens through which we might reconstruct the workplace.

In this context, cognition operates at three levels:

• Individual cognition refers to a person’s capacity to sense, interpret, decide, and learn

• Collective cognition emerges when groups think, adapt and solve problems together in real time.

• Machine cognition, most visibly in AI, augments or replaces specific cognitive tasks, often at scale. Organisational viability increasingly depends on how well these three forms of cognition are designed to work together.

Cognition is important because it is the fuel for innovation. And innovation is how organisations navigate an increasingly disruptive world. So cognition is critical to organisational viability. This is perhaps driving the appetite for AI, which one might generously call ‘artificial cognition’.

AI expands machine cognition, but without the corresponding investment in individual and collective cognition, it often amplifies fragility rather than intelligence.

Little attention is paid to natural cognition of the work force, an untapped asset.

Companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft recognise that stressed workers are less likely to be creative. Conversely unstressed workers have more cognitive bandwidth for creative endeavours.

One way to improve cognitive bandwidth is to make people feel more human at work. Feeling human involves:

• Having a sense of autonomy

• Being able to express oneself creatively

• Regular social interaction

• Regular movement

• The opportunity to be curious

• The opportunity to grow

• Having our courage tested

• Having a collective sense of purpose

• Less work-life balance and more work-life integration.

There are others, but these are important.

So imagine that the workplace was architected so that individuals could experience each of the above. Such a workplace would be akin to a cognitive gymnasium. And so the workers evolve from cogs in the machine to cognitive athletes.

A cognitive gymnasium is optimised for sociality, particularly across disciplines. People are allowed to pursue their hunches. Work is a series of tiny experiments that sometimes lead to substantial innovations. We will explore the cognitive gymnasium in detail in a forthcoming essay.

Organisations that can promise people the opportunity to feel human and develop personally alongside other high performing athletes all in service of the organisation’s goals will both attract and retain the best people.

Such a model requires a high degree of trust and so traditional bosses / managers need to evolve into cognitive coaches. Coaching high performing athletes requires having their interests at heart, whilst not losing sight of the context in which their performance will be measured. It also requires a high degree of trust. It is not unreasonable to share one’s sleep data with a coach in a sporting context. This would likely involve a union / lawyers in a traditional workplace.

So it is a big shift in approach. But done well the individual, the organisation and society will all benefit. Having access to such cognitive athletes significantly increases organisational viability. In time, analysts and investors will value this cognitive approach.

A win for all stakeholders

So work becomes less about climbing a ladder and more about travelling a self-development path. Engineered well, it could even be a path to self-mastery. Why would anyone want to leave an organisation that is helping them discover who they really are. Consequently churn drops, as does the cost of acquisition.

Again all parties win. An intelligently designed organisation can make this a win for all stakeholders.

Such an approach would cultivate healthy competition internally as well as a common esprit de corps. This will no doubt boost the employer brand and again create an inbound momentum that will give the organisation the pick of the best talent.

People will go to work less to pay the bills and fund their lifestyles and more to be part of something purposeful that is bigger them themselves. The self-development piece is a strong added incentive.

Many startups and scaleups get this already. However when they hit maturity the tendency to revert to the factory model is high. Scale leads to averageness and process. Both cognitive toxins. To some extent this is happening to the likes of Google. The challenge for mature organisations is how they embrace this cognitive model.

For consideration

None of this can be addressed through engagement programmes, cultural initiatives or behavioural nudges; it requires a fundamental re-engineering of organisational design.

Some questions to explore:

• How might traditional HR functions evolve to embrace this cognitive athlete / gym approach?

• What changes are needed at an organisational / systems level to create such a cognition-fuelled approach?

• How might society benefit from people who feel human at work?

At this stage of exploration, the cognitive athlete approach might well be advantageous in the ‘war for talent’. Or perhaps more specifically in the ‘war for cognition’.